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possibility of their company being nationalized or the patent seized due to the urgency of the situation.

Many people believe that drug companies would rather make a profit than actually help the people who use their products. Hollywood reinforces these misconceptions with conspiracy theory kinds of movies portraying drug manufacturers as heartless behemoths only interested in making a buck at the expense of an ignorant public. Some past actions on the part of some drug companies who have had their released products removed from the market due to discrepancies in the safety of the product between the trial and the release tend to reinforce these misconceptions. But while a drug company is in the business of making money, inasmuch as it needs to keep the shareholders happy, the fact is any negative publicity impacts the bottom line.

From a more practical point of view, what happens if a drug company withholds its efficient, vaccine-making process in the event of a pandemic in order to make more money? People die. If people die, who buys the drugs? Businesses are often accused of being short-sighted in profit projections, but removing thousands or millions of potential customers from the market is hardly the way to maintain company solvency, let alone earn profits. Patents only ensure that once the emergency is over, the company will be reasonably recompensed for its efforts or methods.

A patent also allows the company to quickly license its processes to be used by other companies, thus increasing the rate of production. Giving up the patents means that all other drug companies - the competition - will be able to use these processes without compensation for the time, effort and cost of developing them in the first place. Further, releasing the patents means a government entity would be in charge of assigning who does what, creating a bureaucracy outside of the normal business practice channels, which could easily result in delays and deaths.

Businesses are in the business to make money. This much is evident. But businesses are also in the business of STAYING in business. Giving up patents for processes they developed, and knowing this will happen, is a huge disincentive for a company to create those processes in the first place. The profit motive makes companies try to minimizing costs in creating the products they have a chance to develop into a money-making product. The profit motive also ensures that patentable processes will help defray the costs in developing

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